Posts Tagged ‘Graffiti’

There’s a small amount of interesting graffiti in Tunis; street art I wasn’t expecting after failing to see Tunisia get a mention in the excellent Arabic Graffiti book which landed under our Christmas tree last year.

Granted, I haven’t come across too much artistic graf (although there are plenty of slogans, politics around the place), but the city just this last weekend got a boost with a Franco-Tunisian project lightening up some walls downtown, as covered by Kapitalis.

Here’s a shot from that project taken on my gopro, as I start to regret leaving the SLR at home due to an abundance of photographic gear…

Nothing to really write home about; which is why the below stencils by the tram lines back to the Bardo area (line number 4) stand out to me. I like the use of the double wall with the Arabic script scrawled inside the hole that the ants are coming out of – alas it is too stylized for my beginner eyes to decrypt. All these years of reading tags, and back to square one!

Finally, the Kill Your Television stencil is by no means original – but I like the fact that Tupac has endorsed it by writing ‘thug life’ next to it. There was always a message.

I’ve always been into graffiti. I put down the can when I was 18, but I’m still an avid admirer. Sydney has great graffiti compared to the last city we lived in, London, but it’s behind our previous home, Berlin, when it comes to styles and simply how much is around. Berlin pretty much kills it.

(note – this is a picture of a throw up – in New York. I’m using it for the same reason I’m not embedding the video – time)

I made a short news film on Australian graffiti for SBS – my employers – looking at legal spaces for graffiti in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as the growth of stenciling and street art. It was a challenge not to do the ‘art or vandalism’ cop out which some of the people I needed to answer to wanted – it could have been done twenty years ago. I touched on the question, but was able to focus a little on the conflict between old skool graf writers and new skool stencil and paste-up artists (‘art fags’, if ‘proper’ writers are to be believed). I shot around half of it, and cut it on Final Cut Pro.